S Morden - No Way

Frank rolled to a halt, and Lucy pulled in alongside him. They dismounted and met in the middle, touching helmets.

“You good?” asked Frank.

“As far as the circumstances dictate.”

“I’ll hand out the weapons, and detach the trailer. Then I’ll just follow your lead. Fan has the spare suit, and I’ll run as much interference as I can. And don’t wait for me: Yun’s the priority here.”

“You know I’m never going to agree to that.”

“Is this where I tell you to go fuck yourself, Lucy? Because I will if I have to.”

“Sure you will, Frank. I make the rules now: no one gets left behind.”

They separated, and Frank held out his fist. She dapped it, deliberately and self-consciously. There wasn’t anything left to say.

He took out the shields he’d made, handed them up to Fan and Isla, then went back for the swords. It looked ridiculous, but no one had come up with a better idea. And, to be fair, it looked terrifying as well. The shock of facing armed and armored warriors when all that separated you from instant death was a pressure suit might just be enough to force a surrender.

Frank unhitched the trailer, strapped his shield to his left arm and, for the want of anything better to do with it, passed his sword to Fan. He climbed up to the driver’s seat and wondered what it was going to be like.

He started forward, and Lucy matched his speed. Isla loaded up the cannon, and fixed the oxygen cylinder to the cistern.

Everything ahead of them was quiet. No spacesuited figures, no one coming out early to clean and turn the solar panels. Maybe, maybe they’d done everyone a favor and turned on each other, and Yun was inside, just waiting to be picked up. Maybe it wouldn’t come to a fight after all.

They swept past the descent ship, and started to slow. Sometime soon, surely, they’d have to be spotted. Not yet, though. Not yet.

Frank put the brakes on some hundred yards from the shadowed hab. He sat in his seat, watching the airlock, and still nothing. Then he stood up in his seat and looked back at the ship.

The descent ship he came in had had cameras on the outside.

Goddammit, they were going to have to go in and quickly.

He climbed down, held Fan’s sword while he dismounted, and together they jogged up to the hab’s airlock.

It had exactly the same design as their own. XO standard hardware. He ran up the steps, and pressed the airlock cycle button.

Red light.

OK, so the airlock had power, but it wasn’t cycling. Someone had propped the inner door open. The only way in was to equalize the pressure either side of the outer door, and Frank knew two ways of doing that. One slow and easy to thwart, and one quick, and very, very dirty. And if Yun was in there, out of her suit, most likely fatal.

He butted heads with Fan.

“We’re not getting in that way. We have to go through the wall.”

“Do they know we’re outside?”

“Yes. Get Isla to fire.”

Lucy had rolled her buggy so that it was square on, some fifty feet away. She grabbed Leland’s suit, and dashed across the open ground, dragging its heels after her. Then she handed it to Fan, who tucked his sword under the metal steps, to keep it from being used against him.

She gave Frank the OK sign. She turned and gave Isla the OK sign.

They all crouched down, and Isla turned on the oxygen.

It felt like he’d been waiting for ever when there was an audible pop, and the thick membrane of the hab puckered inwards. A fist-sized hole appeared about six feet off the ground, and the rubber rippled as the shockwave whipped through it.

Almost immediately, the warm, moist air inside started to geyser out, turning to ice in the frigid near-vacuum outside. Frank drove his sword through the breach and dragged it down. The gust knocked him backwards, but Lucy was already pushing through, braced against the headwind. Frank leaned in behind.

The countdown had started. They didn’t have long. Twenty, thirty seconds to find Yun, get her into a suit, pressurize it.

Entering the hab, Frank didn’t know what to expect. What he could get out of Jerry was that they’d partially put the second-storey floor in, but there were no internal walls. Stores, such as they were, were downstairs. Sleeping was upstairs. There’d be at least one ladder up, and he could jump and scale eight feet in open space in any event.

It was far more filthy, more chaotic, than he’d anticipated, but the basic structure was right. Lucy had gone left, to the ladder, so he went right, climbing over a loose pile of drums towards the clear area beyond. The air pressure was dropping fast, and he couldn’t hear much, nothing beyond the faint sound of Lucy’s boots on the rungs. Fan was through too, looking frantically for Yun on the lower deck.

She didn’t seem to be there, so Frank left Fan to search, and reached the open portion of the hab.

No sign of Yun.

He spotted movement above him: outlined by the faint light, two figures were struggling to enter their spacesuits. OK, Frank. Remember what you came here to do. Save Yun. These people made their choices, just as you made yours. They get to live with that, same as you do.

Frank bent his legs beneath him, and pushed off with as much force as he could muster. It was Mars, and he soared.

The edge of the floor passed his eyeline, and he planted his feet solidly on the platform, right arm outstretched so he didn’t cut himself on his own sword. But the two people—one man, one woman—frantically trying to seal their suits, were simply intent on finding air to breathe, and not interested in him.

Where the hell was Yun? The emergency lighting didn’t show her at all.

Lucy emerged at the top of the ladder and instinctively smashed her shield boss into the faceplate of someone who’d already got their suit on. There was someone else at her feet, moving feebly, trying to crawl away—definitely not Yun, but the guy Frank had faced off earlier, the one who’d taken Jim’s suit. The two behind him weren’t Yun either.

Where was she?

He knew that letting them get into their suits and then having to fight them didn’t make any sense. He put his foot against the female astronaut’s side and kicked her over the edge, then swung his sword hard at the second. They put their hand up to ward off Frank’s blow—instinctive, but very wrong.

The blade wasn’t sharp-sharp, but it was moving fast and it broke the man’s hand as it hit the palm of the gauntlet. The scream was silent, and Frank kicked him away, too, sending him spinning down into the drums and the debris below.

He checked quickly on Lucy—her man was down, cowering, covering his head, his back to her, and the crawler, suitless, had stopped moving completely. Below him, the woman had managed to seal herself, and she was making her way towards the rent, and towards Fan.

Frank dropped on her from above, boots hitting her helmet, sending them both falling apart. They were up at the same time, but Frank knew where his enemy was, while she would only be able to see Fan’s suit lights as he pushed and pulled the drums aside.

Frank punched out with his shield, right into her life support, and sent her sprawling. Seeing her in that suit, lying there, arms out, legs spread, reminded him too much of Brack and he could feel himself go into that same cold place where killing was necessary and the only thing that would save him and those he cared about.

Then Fan was there, arms around him, holding him back. Their helmets were touching, and he was saying, “It’s OK, Frank. It’s OK. You can stop now. You can stop,” over and over, and after a while, the urge to keep stabbing and hitting faded, and he was able to listen to reason once more.

He took a step back. Yun wasn’t here. That meant one of two things.